Paul Campaign Disavows “Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion” Sale

Ron Paul campaign chairman Jesse Benton told BuzzFeed the candidate doesn’t have anything to do with a user-contributed page on the website for the Campaign For Liberty that had been advertising copies of the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

“Campaign for Liberty has a blogging community with hundreds of thousands of accounts,” he told BuzzFeed.

“The post is no longer there, but whatever it was, it was from one individual blogger, not a staffer or anything from the official group.”

Though Campaign for Liberty is not officially tied by the Paul organization, though it has strong ties to it — Benton, for example, was formerly a vice president there, and Senator Rand Paul sent out an email today on the group’s behalf.

Paul has long draw support from elements of the fringe whose views he says he doesn’t share, however, and his oft-criticized newsletter — which he says he didn’t write or oversee — contains anti-Semitic themes.

The post that sold copies of the Protocols was posted on the website by user Clayton Douglas, a New Mexico man who runs a radio show and website called “The Free American” and who is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2003 “40 to Watch: Leaders of the Radical Right” list. It had been on the site since 2008 until today.